


La Confidenza

by capo (gliss)



Category: Free!
Genre: 19th Century, 19th century romance, Canon Compliant, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Multi, Past Lives, Period Appropriate Homophobia, Reincarnation, artist!Haruka, composer!Makoto, historical setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:03:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/pseuds/capo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[ “All of Paris falls in love with you tonight, maestro.” ]</p><p>Makoto and Haruka meet in 19th century Paris, when their lives are a whirl of concerts and fine art, and hushed moments under dying candles. But that is not the first time they meet, and it is not the last. Fill for <a href="http://marukaprompts.tumblr.com/post/74020777510/">this post</a> at marukaprompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**one**

In their first life, they don’t meet at all.

The name he’s been signed to is _Haruka_ , and he is an ordinary guard, clothed in ordinary garb, with a shield of medium quality and weight, and he stands in the imperial army of Heaven. There is no night or day in this Heaven, just endless worlds bursting into life and dying before his eyes. He has dark hair, darker than many of his fellow guards (soldiers, he supposes, although there are hardly wars to be fighting in), and his eyes are blue. He’s told that he is formed from a river, his features carefully pressed and moulded from something that is not meant to carry its own shape. He’s told that he’ll spend his entire life wanting to be free, but - if he resists, perhaps the reward will be greater than the cost.

When they stand in formation, there is a taller figure who stands in a place that is one row ahead and six spaces to the left, one with broad shoulders and a smile that is too soft, easily cut through by a metal blade.

Eventually, there is a war. They are thrown down from the skies onto the earthly ground. Haru rubs soil between his fingertips as he wakes, and feels that it is softer than the kind they have in his Heaven. He takes a blade of grass between his palms. There is a silver-haired boy, too young to be fighting, but fighting anyway, who shows him how to catch the fish darting against each other in a pond. His eyes are almost the same shade of blue. Almost. They’re lighter, more innocent, reminiscent more of the sky than the sea.

The war is terrible, a messy, but systematic affair involving long marches, speeches full of the words _discipline_ and _responsibility_ and _honor_. When the one with the soft smile has his smile cut right through, twice, split into thirds in a burst of red, Haru catches a glimpse of surprised green, and sees the life wink right out of them, and feels his heart lurch as the body hits the ground.

Haru survives enough to return to his Heaven, where the water is bluer than anything on earth. When he washes, something inside of him strains to meld into the water. He lives long enough, decades, maybe a century, maybe two, until he’s struck in the heart by an arrow, and he feels a faint twinge of impatience as his world deepens to black, and his form slips back into the river’s flow.

 

**two**

In their second life, they meet once.

Haruka is a teacher, his hands steady on a calligraphy brush. He watches ink seeping into the page and wishes that it would look smoother, and he teaches a girl with red, red hair; she ties it up and lowers her voice and tells him that she is a boy.

“I might as well be one,” she says, clearing her throat, “My name is not feminine at all.”

Haru’s eyebrows set a little harder over his eyes, and he writes a character. Three vertical dots on the left, representing water. And a sturdy, straightforward shape on the right, two horizontals connected in the middle, the character for _work_. Put them together, and the name comes to life on the page, pushing impatiently against the fibers of the paper like the insistent waters it represents. Haru watches as the ink settles.

“Your name,” he indicates, “Gou.”

Gou pouts, realizes that it is an incredibly feminine thing to do, and rearranges her face into a scowl instead. “I dislike it.”

“Ten more minutes, Gou-sama,” comes a voice from the doorway, and Haruka looks up, moving a heavily draping sleeve out of the way of his writing. He meets a steady green gaze, a strong, honest face, and a surprised kind of smile. A moment later, the young man in the doorway bows his head. “My apologies for interrupting.” He has the kind of voice that melts into the summer sky. Haruka wonders if he knows, and he wants to call out.

Instead, he says, “I’ll keep time properly, next week,” and the young man bows deeply before stepping out of the doorway, a strand of sandy colored hair falling over his forehead. Haruka wants to brush it aside. He nearly rises, but Gou catches his eye, a question arching her brow. They don’t see each other again, not the next week when Gou returns for her lesson, not a year later when she marries a silver-haired boy, and not before he catches a cold trying to capture raindrops in his brush and never recovers.

It takes him a long time to die, months, and he always wakes up exhausted, each time more so than the last, trying to figure out if _he knows_. He ends up being too tired to seek an answer, and implores the river from which he came to stop granting him the memories.

The water has always loved him, and so agrees.

 

**three**

This is not a story about their third life. (It was uneventful, working side by side in a market, never speaking; Haruka was a fisherman, and the green-eyed boy worked with a grill of some kind. They sometimes nodded at each other in the mornings, and Haru envied his skill in cooking fish, and wished he could have the same skill all to himself.) This is not a story about their fourth, either. (Soldiers, again, Haruka fearlessly commanding his troops, although he again felt impatience when he took a spear between the ribs at point blank range, and watched the red bursting through his armor.)

Their shoulders brushed, and brushed again, and in due time, Haruka wakes in the body of an artist.


	2. Le Poisson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Makoto shows _him_ something beautiful: a rippling of sound against ivory, all at once a thunderstorm and a winter wind, a clear sky, a hundred brilliant stars.

“All of Paris falls in love with you tonight, maestro.”

Makoto Tachibana (although back home, he is Tachibana Makoto) turns around, his green eyes lit from the inside. Haruka knows his name already. All of Paris - all of educated Paris, anyway - knows his name. He can’t think of a name that might fit better. Makoto’s eyes are full of stars, possibly the very most luminous ones that he must have plucked from the sky and fit into his mind. Where else would he get the inspiration for his music?

“Ah… sorry?” he gets in response, along with an apologetic smile.

Haruka clears his throat. “Congratulations, I meant. Your… your fourth symphony.” He fits French syllables around his mouth, swallows them like candy and lets the sweetness linger in the air. Then, decides that he doesn’t like sweets much, and switches to Japanese with half a smile pulling across his face. “It reminds me of home.”

“Oh, oh, thank you,” Makoto says, his eyes lighting up even further, this time with a hint of his third glass of champagne behind the stars. He’s speaking Japanese, too, without even realizing it, and bows, even though he doesn’t have to. “I’m so glad, I wrote it because I missed home.” The way he says _home_ is beautiful. The way Japanese falls in Haruka’s ears is beautiful, too, clipped and lilting and clean.

“I caught a story in your music,” Haruka says, his voice soft, “do you like to tell stories?”

“I love them.” A brief look of uncertainty crosses Makoto’s face, before the smile is back. “I love stories, I have so many books at home…” he leans in, just a little, enough so that Haruka can smell apples, and the starchy scent of new gloves, and a faint rush of alcohol. His cheeks are flushed, their warm glow made warmer still by the setting sun. When Makoto speaks the words rustle like silk against his ear. “I was thinking of doing an opera, you know. But I’m no good with librettos. I have such a hard time with words.”

“You are a natural genius at music, then,” Haruka answers: “Let me tell you a story I heard, instead, the one you told me while I listened to your music.”

 

 

By the time night settles, Haruka has introduced himself as an artist. “I make woodblock prints,” he explains, “I was invited by one of your students to attend this premiere.”

They are sitting around a table now, in the more presentable part of Makoto’s apartment; there is a piano with the lid open and a thick book weighing on the music desk, and the kitchen table is covered with stacks and stacks of manuscripts, some bound, some slipping dangerously off the edge of the table. Haru’s workplace is neat, at home, the clutter of tools arranged in a pattern at least.

Makoto lights his room brightly, and looks out the window like something is going to barge in. His eyes flicker back to Haruka at that, and something in his face relaxes. “Nagisa, probably.”

(Nagisa, he calls him - because he asked for a name when Hyacinthe Ermenegilde became too much to stick - not a brilliant mind, but a brilliant heart, and that is what matters, when it comes down to it. A bright young lord, hair as golden as the sandy beaches of Nice. Haru told him his hair was beautiful, said it with a bit of a smile on his face, because his brother Rei, back home, would have said the exact same words.)

“Hung onto my elbow the entire performance,” Haruka says. He watches as the corners of Makoto’s eyes go all soft.

“It’s getting late,” he says, his voice the same kind of softness as his smile. “I’m sorry I have to cut this conversation so sharply, but I have a lesson tomorrow morning.” He ducks his head, shy, and then asks Haruka if he might see some of his prints, one day. Haru nods, they shake hands congenially, and he’s out the door.

 

 

After that, they meet each other almost everywhere. At breakfast on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and lunch on Saturdays. They both like to eat lunch early, much earlier than anyone else they know. They both like to frequent the same cafe, and take walks along the same streets, and they wonder why they haven’t ever met before.

Haruka’s feeling of impatience slowly fades away, and when it’s gone completely he doesn’t know if he ever felt it at all, before. He tells Makoto about his works, the stories in every print. He shows Makoto his tools, the knife that he uses to cut, the ink that is bluish that he tests his work with, the silk he has imported from home every few months. He lets Makoto make a simple shape, a triangle, and then a square, and then a circle. Makoto is a little clumsy with his fingers, when it comes to art.

But not when it comes to music.

Makoto shows _him_ something beautiful, a rippling of sound against ivory, all at once a thunderstorm and a winter wind, a clear sky, a hundred brilliant stars. Makoto shows him how he picks out a tune with a finger, and then how that tune grows into iridescence. He spends an afternoon lounging on Makoto’s couch while the piano rips across two centuries of history, from the simplest of Bach’s minuets to the dark richness of Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto, to a lively, tripping Chopin waltz. Makoto blazes through a new book in one evening. Haru closes his eyes and rests his head against the cushion and lets the music wash over him like an ocean wave, flickering in time to the candle flame dancing against the wall.

They go to see a premiere together, Makoto slipping him a ticket slipped to _him_ by Nagisa. It’s a violin piece by Mendelssohn, a concerto. They’re on the floor, in the middle of the audience. Makoto doesn’t mind leaning over to explain, patiently, the clever way the work is put together. Haru listens to the moody churning of the orchestra, and the sharp, unexpectedly painful tug of the violin bow, the glass-like whistle of an overtone bleeding into his chest. When the first movement shifts into the next, he’s surprised to feel Makoto pressing a handkerchief into his hand with a shy smile, and even more surprised to find that he needs it.

Haru remembers the last time he cried; he was sixteen, Rei was thirteen, defiantly trying to hold back his tears when Haru told him that they could not go west together. Haru let his tears slip out, first, and Rei cried angrily into a draping sleeve, even though he protested crying at all the entire time.

That was eight, almost nine years ago. He feels a little old just thinking about it. The violin draws lush, warm arpeggios into the concert hall, a solo, rests interrupted by nothing but the sound of steady breathing from the audience. Next to him, Makoto is absolutely still, his throat tight, but his lips parted slightly, like he is physically drinking in the sound. Haruka thinks, he would like to make a print of Makoto some day. The orchestra seeps back into play. He can feel the entire hall relax.

When the piece ends, Makoto is on his feet. Haruka follows suit almost instantly. They clap, and all around them is a flurry of white, like a snowstorm, but without the muteness of the cold.

Makoto says, his smile as full of stars now as it was when they first met, “You’re crying, Haru.”

“You are, too. Besides, they are good tears.” Even so, Haru brushes Makoto’s handkerchief against his face.

The hesitation before Makoto’s next words tastes metallic, startlingly cold and just a little sweet.

“They look good in your eyes, Haru.”

 

 

Makoto has a key made for Haru, so that he might have a place to practice. He teaches Haru how to read music, just simple melodies, and then he teaches Haru proper keyboard technique, and then he says -

“Maybe it’s easier if - here,” and he takes Haruka’s hand and puts it over his own, “see, it’s less about the fingers than the wrist,” and he moves Haruka’s hand again and tells him to feel the center of his palm, “and how relaxed you are here,” and he places Haruka’s hand back on the keys, “now you try it.”

Haru’s hands are so controlled with a chisel, with his knife, and they are so lost against the smoothness of a piano. He presses down on a chord and the sound is brittle, weak. When Makoto plays the sound is warm and full and round, like the moon as of late. Haruka has spent perhaps three hours close to a piano in his life before he met Makoto, and now, he spends twice that time every day, just to listen, with his eyes closed, and his work almost abandoned. At night Makoto ushers him out the door with a smile, and then a frown, and admonishes him for spending so much of his time here.

“I’m learning,” Haru protests, “So I’m not wasting my time or anything. I like it here.”

 

 

Eventually, one evening, Makoto stops in the middle of a piece, his fingers lingering against the keys but not pressing.

Haru’s head is tipped back and his eyes closed, and he murmurs: “Keep going.”

“Haru…”

He opens one of his eyes, just halfway. “Hm?”

“I think…” Makoto’s voice is a little strained. Haru doesn’t know why. (Or, perhaps he does.) He opens both of his eyes all the way and catches Makoto’s back doing a strange kind of shivering before both hands are being taken away from the piano, and settled instead around the edges of his chair. “I think you should go home.” Makoto manages a weak little smile. “Don’t you miss your art? I- I miss your art, Haru. I want to see… you… m-make more of it.”

“I’m taking a break,” Haru tells him, “to learn music from you.”

“It’s been almost a year,” Makoto says, “you haven’t produced anything for _eight months_.”

“Nine,” Haruka reminds him absently.

“Nine months! What are you… what are you even living off of?”

“I have enough money, Makoto.”

“I can’t… I can’t compose, when you’re here,” Makoto says miserably. “I need to write something. I can’t make my living as a performer, that’s not - what I do - and I can’t keep telling Nagisa that I have something on the way when I have _nothing_.”

“You have time,” Haru says, patiently, but he sits up straight.

Makoto whispers, “Haruka, please.”

A feeling of dread drills itself deep into Haruka’s spine. He stands up uncertainly, and his movements are maybe ten, twenty percent sure. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, _he’s never not known what to do with his hands_. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to think, and that’s never happened, either. “Am I… am I a burden to you?”

“No, o-of course not,” Makoto says, and that catch in his voice is enough for Haru to shrug his coat on. “I didn’t mean -”

“It’s okay,” Haruka says, feeling strangely distant, like he isn’t standing in the same room as Makoto, like he never has. “It’s okay.”

“Haru -”

“It’s okay,” Haru repeats again, mostly to himself, and he calmly, very calmly, walks out of the apartment.

 

 

In the two weeks after that, Haruka sulks and makes two new prints: a piano, and a weeping willow. He hates them; the rest of the world loves them.

He talks to Nagisa, and sends letters home.

Nagisa tells him that he needs to be closer to the sea, “Isn’t that the holder of all the dreams, or something similar?” And Haru speaks French again for long stretches of time, too long, and he feels like his mouth can’t keep up.

“I know I…” he slumps back against his chair. “I always had an escape. It was always art, and then it was all this music. Everything was so _new_ , and Makoto -”

“Haru,” Nagisa says, and then, after a pause, adds: “-chan,” which makes Haru twitch a little even in his current state, because the honorific comes out all wrong, and he wonders if Nagisa actually knows what he’s saying. “You can’t always live in your dream world, you’ll start pulling other people there too.” And then Nagisa’s pale fingers drum on the table, his eyes glimmering almost ruby-like in the bright sunlight, “Maybe you need something new. Something you haven’t seen before.”

Haru’s eyebrow arches up.

“Maybe you should go on a tour,” Nagisa continues, sounding more and more excited, “See Venice and Bath and Vienna, and Salzburg, and Bonn, and of course spend a few weeks on the coast, the salt in the air will do you good, you can go with someone, I have a few friends I can introduce you to! Don’t worry about the money, either, I have plenty, and you know Lord Giroux is very fond of your work, too -”

“Nagisa, he eats pies for every meal of the day.”

“And he paints!”

“Nagisa,” Haru sighs, recalling the day he met Lord Giroux and his fantastically horrifying blond wig.

“Nevermind, let me get you in touch with someone in Vienna, at least.”

And it turns out that the person in Vienna is a sculptor. His hair is long and silky, the color of red, red wine, his smile sharp enough to cut. He is charismatic, drawing crowds as easily as he parts them. He takes Haru around Europe, and they go to exhibits, and hold exhibits, and Haru loses himself in his old world for three months.

The sculptor’s name is Masson, and his most famous work is of a boy with a beauty mark under his eye, and their trip is cut short when his sister falls ill. They part ways at a dock in Hamburg, Haruka assuring him that everything will be just fine, and Masson’s lips are pressed together too tightly when he finally turns away. “I’ll write you,” he says, shouts, “and tell you about all the sights I haven’t shown you,” and Haruka nods.

He doesn’t write.

 

 

When he returns to Paris, he has seventeen new prints.

Instead of going home, he turns down a cheerful street with four cafes pressed up against each other, each with different colored silk banners drawn over their doors, with the poster of a brown-haired woman rising up out of the waves just around the corner.

His key still slides smoothly into the keyhole, and twists just as smoothly, and the door opens just as easily as it once had.

Makoto’s cleared up his work table. There is a new tea set, a cup of half-finished tea. He’s moved his horror stack of manuscripts on top of the piano instead. He has a new tablecloth, too. And new curtains. It’s daylight, and the room is not as brightly lit as it would be at night. It smells just the same, like candles and apple and ink.

Haru is still holding onto his belongings; they reek of ships and journeys. He lets them drop onto the floor, and takes an unsteady seat at the piano, and traces his fingers over the melody of _Sur le pont d’Avignon_ when Makoto pokes his head from behind a doorway, green eyes wide in alarm.

Haru doesn’t know what to say, for once. He stands up instead.

Makoto says, “Haruka?”

In that voice Haru hears the color woodwinds of Vienna, the whirling rooftops of Prague, a May breeze along the Normandy beaches. He just stands there, as Makoto slowly makes his way towards him - he looks just the same, his hair a little longer, and he has a new shirt, one with looser sleeves.

They’re standing two feet apart, eyes rounded, hands empty, when Haruka finds his voice.

“I’m sor-”

Makoto hugs him, a little too tight, a little too wild, a little too warm.

“Haruka,” he says, “Haru,” over and over. When he pulls away he has a big smile on his face, happiness tearing at the corners of it, happiness bleeding out in a hoarse, disbelieving laugh. “I heard all these rumors,” he says, “I heard about your work.”

Haru smiles, too, like he went on an overnight trip instead of a three-month-long one. “I brought them all.” His voice is high, blurry with excitement. He imagines what might have happened if they met like this, instead, Makoto as the starstruck one, him guiding Makoto’s hands around the carving tools day after day after day. “I want to show you.”

 

 

He doesn’t stay long after Makoto heaps words of praise on his prints, because despite everything, despite the genuinity of that wide smile and the warmth in that happy voice, something stays brittle and cold between them. But the next day, he comes back, with some paper, and ink, and he sketches while Makoto scribbles notes down at the piano, humming softly to himself. They spend the morning working quietly; occasionally, Makoto will ask him, does this sound better, or this?

Makoto peers at his sketch and asks him if he always starts from the middle of the page.

“I start anywhere I want,” Haru tells him, “whichever part I feel the most strongly about, I draw first.” He pauses, and asks, “Don’t you do the same?”

“No, never, I always write my music in order, so I can hear it the way others will hear it.”

“Then, you’re saying it sounds the same to everyone?”

“No… well…” Makoto looks at him with a laugh. Haruka puts down his pen. The sun is high in the sky now, at just the right angle to slant through the window. Makoto takes this as a sign to offer Haru some sweet tea, which he accepts gratefully.

“What are you writing now?” he asks, after a long sip.

Makoto says, shyly, “An opera.”

“An opera about…” Haru prompts, his interest piqued; he’s never heard Makoto work on anything with lyrics.

“An artist,” Makoto replies, his eyes anywhere but on Haru. “I always have the same problem, though. I can’t get a librettist, I asked many people, but they don’t have his _voice_ done right. And they don’t like the story,” he finishes, frowning a little. Haru’s mouth presses into a thin line and he leaves after lunch, a pitiful sounding excuse falling from his lips.

 

 

It takes a while, not as long as he feared but also longer than he hoped, to smooth out the jagged edges between them. He goes to Makoto’s apartment to practice on his piano, and returns home to work on his prints in the afternoons. He talks about his travels objectively, and Makoto asks about them objectively, neither of them mentioning the opera.

Haru watches Makoto’s eyes, how they close when he plays. Makoto relaxes around him by degrees, until he spends an entire day on the couch again, surrounded by music, a book balanced on his chest, falling in love. He falls a little more in love every day.

Makoto asks him for help one afternoon, the tension leaving his shoulders when Haru nods and takes a seat next to him at the piano.

“I need you to play this line here,” Makoto says, pointing at a line in his manuscript. It’s frenzied and kind of rushed looking, but Haru stares at it long enough to start making sense of the shorthand before he nods, placing his right hand gingerly on top of the keys. Almost immediately he hears an apology: _sorry Haru, I know you don’t sightread that much_.

“It’s fine,” Haru says, his eyes fixed determinedly on the music.

Makoto counts him off, gives him four measures of orchestral reduction, and they plunk through four lines of aria together. Haru recognizes the pattern, and a structure, and starts growing comfortable with the music, hums along, waits for the story to hit him, like it does every time he hears Makoto’s music.

After the first repeat sign, Makoto stops playing and picks up his pen and jots down notes, dynamics, and what Haru thinks might be instrumentation. He doesn’t know; he realizes that instead of washing over him, the story has been in his head this entire time, and it makes him dizzy with the implications. So he frowns and puts his hand on the manuscript.

“Let me do it,” he says.

“... orchestrate?” Makoto asks, bewildered.

Haru shakes his head. “No, libretto.”

 

 

The sense of impatience comes back. Haru doesn’t know why; he’s happy, when he delivers a verse to Makoto’s door, when Makoto’s eyes light up, when Makoto takes to the piano like a child again, when Makoto claps him on the shoulder and his hand lingers just a moment longer than it needs to.

 _He loves me, I know he does_.

They don’t do anything. They don’t have to. Haru is happy and in love, and his words get warmer and warmer, caught up in his love. Makoto puts in the lushest harmonies he can dream up with the happiest smile on his face, and at the end of the day, he runs through new sections on the piano, and Haru laughs and hums his way through the vocal melody.

But when he goes home, at night, the covers tangle up between his legs and around his body tightly, and his chest constricts. He feels like he’s being pushed, by himself, by everyone around him, by the universe, time itself. Pushed towards something. He doesn’t know where the feeling is coming from.

 

 

Here is the story that Haruka hungers for:

An artist bleeds ink over the sketch of a goldfish. He bleeds because that is the last remaining thing left to him, caught for too many days in a snowstorm, lost. He dips his hands and draws out the last thing he can think of, a goldfish swimming through the snow.

The goldfish comes alive. It glitters in the cold, sharp and vibrant scales rattling against the snow. It speaks, in a tenor voice, and tells the artist not to be afraid. It shifts, shrugs off its scales in a glimmering snowfall, and its scales hit the white ground like coins, and reveals the body of a boy with eyes of gold. When he moves, his hair catches the sunset and weaves a halo around him. He tells the artist to take care of him, so he can make all his dreams come true. They find shelter, and he kisses the artist’s fingers until they are warm. They find food, and the artist presses a leaf between his lips. (Here the orchestra is simmering, while all around the sound in ribbons the woodwinds fly.)

The two of them travel the world, when winter blooms into spring.

The artist brings him into the bustling, churning city, where together they hold exhibits and walk up and down the river. The artist says, “I hope this will last forever,” and the goldfish boy just smiles.

 

 

“And then?” Haruka asks, in the hushed silence that follows, staring at the blank paper where Makoto has yet to write the ending.

Makoto smiles and admits that he doesn’t know, and the smile breaks through the gossamer spell that the music has cast over the two of them. He turns away, rubbing the back of his neck, and his hands gather up the papers, stacking them neatly back onto the lid of the piano.

Haru kisses him.

It’s not the first time Haru has kissed someone - there were a few parties with too much wine and too close a proximity to Nagisa and too many proclamations of friendship and _oh, a genius!_ \- but it is the first time he is kissing Makoto. And it isn’t - well, it isn’t _beautiful_ ; they are both flushed already with the story and their eyes are strained from staring at a score all day, and Makoto is just a _little_ too tall for him, and their bodies are at the wrong angle; Makoto’s mouth is a little bit crooked on his, as if he had tried to say something. But, at the same time, it _is_ beautiful, in the bizarre and striking way that Rei finds things beautiful.

It isn’t a long kiss, either: it’s too rushed, and harder than Haruka meant it to be, as if all the impatience he’s been feeling shoved him from behind and pushed him into Makoto’s path.

Makoto draws back, his eyes wide, his mouth - it didn’t close all the way, during the kiss - opens a little further and he says, “H… aru?”

It takes just another moment (an appoggiatura, a resolution, just a beat of rest or maybe even less than that) before Makoto’s face softens and he smiles.

Haru tells him before he can speak, and use all the wrong words, as he is prone to doing. “I know,” he says clearly, leaning in again even though the piano keys are jutting out against his leg, and Makoto is still tall, he says, “me, too,” and this time Makoto meets him halfway.

 

 

Makoto calls his work _Le Poisson_ and Haru tells him that he could, probably, be more creative with the title. Haruka sees his own apartment less and less often, and his prints grow dusty. He spends a night tucked hard against Makoto’s body, and compares their hands; his fingers are more slender, but Makoto’s are longer, the right kind to pull music soft and rippling out of an instrument that looks like it should be neither, and the kind that wrap around a conductor’s baton so carefully, and lovingly.

No wonder Paris is in love with him. But, Haruka thinks, Makoto loves _him_.

 

 

Summer falls into autumn, and again comes the gloves and dark coats, the hats.

Their quiet block is in an uproar when a beautiful woman shows up to a party on Lord Giroux’s arm; she has brown hair and kind eyes and a fancy, shimmering shawl, and everyone recognizes her as being the woman on the poster around the corner.

Haru sips his tea, and leans his head against Makoto’s shoulder, and entertains him with possible theories as to how the woman came to be here. Makoto laughs. He has a beautiful laugh. He also sounds beautiful when he says “oh, no” in the mornings, when he sees that it is later than it should be, and the sheets fall away from his body.

Sometimes people ask them if they are the very best of friends.

“Yes,” Haruka tells them, before everyone around them starts nodding, remarking that it is amazing, the pearls of the East meeting in Paris of all places, and how naturally they inspire each other. Then the conversation moves on to Haruka’s art, which he has neglected in favor of helping Makoto work on _Le Poisson_ , and usually at that time, Makoto laughs and draws them away.

Makoto never kisses him in public, never keeps his arm around Haru’s shoulders for too long, and takes care in being extraordinarily polite and kind to everyone around them. Haru thinks he does this almost subconsciously. Automatically. He is okay, for now. But he doesn’t hesitate, when they are out, to lead Makoto down a deserted alley and kiss him until they have to hold onto each other to be able to stand. When Makoto sends his work off to his orchestra and steps out of the theatre from the first rehearsal with a look of absolute triumph on his face, open and fierce and bright in his joy, Haru grabs his hand, and presses him against a concrete wall, and carves his love for him across Makoto’s tanned skin with his tongue.

They’re not caught that time, not when Makoto whimpers into his hand and arches into his mouth, and it makes them bold.

The closer opening night comes, the more brazen they get.

They sneak kisses near the river, in the rain when everyone around them rushes home. Their fingers lace together when a strong wind comes and the leaves swirl through the air in a blur of red and gold, like goldfish scales.

Haruka says it first, the words slipping out from his mouth and into Makoto’s: “I love you, Makoto.”

In his mind, the orchestra is simmering again, silver, soft. Makoto looks at him with his eyes full of stars again, the light from a candle flickering gold into the green.

“I love you, Haruka.”

Makoto’s smile breaks up into laughs, later that night. It’s amazing, how he can’t piece it back together all the way.

 

 

Opening night comes. Haru watches him dress for it, pulling on a clean shirt, so white that it blazes unnaturally into the yellow light of the room. He helps Makoto straight out his sleeves, and his collar, presses a kiss into his neck.

He folds over the cuff of Makoto’s sleeve tenderly, his fingers shaking in a way that they have never done before. He hesitates and says, “I’ll see you afterward, right?”

“Of course,” Makoto smiles.

Haru must look worried, because Makoto’s smile wavers, and slips, and in a second he’s leaning in to brush his lips against Haru’s. “Of course,” he repeats.

Haru’s fingers curl into Makoto’s vest. “Don’t… don’t wander off by yourself with too much champagne,” he says, but what he really means is, _don’t push me away_.

The show is beautiful. Makoto discovered a newfound love for the harp halfway through, and instructs a number of rippling shifts, turning the music from rose-gold to blue-green, scattering colors and melodies and moods across the stage. The audience loves it, applauds wildly when the goldfish shrugs off a dazzling costume of scales and bursts into his human form like a phoenix. They love the clear, vibrant ring of the tenor voice rising high above the excitement of the crowd.

In the end, the artist ends up letting the goldfish return to the water, after spending years with him in a polluted city.

They painted the boy’s arms gold, latticed red across again and again in scale patterns. His skin glimmered beautifully under the bright lights. The artist asked him, as he slipped into an opening in the stage floor, if they would ever meet again, thanking him for his help and his friendship.

 _I am sure of it_ , were the goldfish boy’s last sung words.

Haru brings his own handkerchief, this time, and wipes his tears when no one can see him. He caught a glimpse of Makoto’s hair once, during intermission, but that was it. He seeks him out backstage, catching hold of Nagisa’s arm and making the young man part crowds for him.

Makoto sees him first, rushes over enthusiastically, his arms full of flowers. “Haruka! Haru - what did you think - do you think they loved it -”

“You made me cry,” Haruka says weakly, “I don’t know. Yes.”

They crush flower petals between their bodies on the way home, and neither of them care that they’re holding hands in the dark, taking the paths where lamps don’t shine, using nothing but the light of the moon (suddenly soft, suddenly round and warm and beautiful - Haruka thinks about making a print for the first time in so many months) and the stars to guide themselves home.

They end up against another stone wall; it is dark, and there is so much adrenaline coursing through them that Makoto doesn’t hold back his cries of pleasure. The wind that had swept across the theatre that evening was gone. Everything washes itself in soft, thrumming silver - the line of Makoto’s cheek, the hollow of his throat, his cufflinks, his wristbones. It is quiet, the sounds of the city far away.

“I wish this will last forever,” Haruka says in an unconscious echo of the goldfish boy, collapsing against his lover as the night cools around them.

Makoto is silent when they readjust their clothes, when they slip into his apartment, when they fall asleep.

 

 

The public loves _Le Poisson_. - And they love Makoto.

They surge around him, lady admirers swooning in the streets, pressing the backs of their hands against his mouth. Haruka lingers around him. The smiles of the lady admirers grow a little colder, a little sharper, each time they see the two of them together.

Haruka ignores the whispers, since Makoto doesn’t pay attention to them.

It’s the third morning, when the words reach him, hissed into his ear during breakfast. “It won’t last forever.”

When Makoto comes down to join him for coffee, he asks him what’s the matter. “You’re pale, Haruka.”

“It’s winter,” Haru replies, and tugs his scarf back on, ignoring the bread crumbs spilling onto wool.

 

 

 _Le Poisson_ runs again on a Thursday evening, and then on a Saturday afternoon, and by that time, somehow, Haruka has shut himself in Makoto’s apartment, refusing to go out, because every time he does, the crowd shouts, presses in too close, pulls away too far.

He writes letters to Rei, asking his little brother how everything is back home. Makoto starts to make worried face when he comes home, and the sound of _Japan_ begins permeating through their conversations. Haruka finds that he misses home after all, misses the sight of Rei leaping down the stone steps out of a shrine four at a time.

“Flying is beautiful,” Rei used to say, and Haru would always argue with him that perhaps water is more beautiful, and now, years later, they still argue about it in their letters.

“You could go visit,” Makoto says one afternoon, a Sunday. “And tell me what things have changed back home.”

“I want to stay with you,” Haruka replies, the old impatience suddenly rushing to his head. He realizes at that moment that it’s not impatience he feels - it is fear. Fear that something will cut through them like a knife, or smash them into pieces, or pierce through his world like an arrow. His chest twinges in pain at the thought.

“Haru…” Makoto seems to take a deep breath. When he exhales, the words come out white and wispy and weak into the room. “Haru, it’s… not safe.”

“You’re doing it, too,” Haruka says with a frown. “You never stop me. You kissed me _first_ this morning.”

“I’m fine,” but even saying that sounds half-hearted, from Makoto, who always uses too many words too strongly, and this thin, pastel voice floating like steam over the table is not Makoto. “I will be… fine.”

“Come with me,” Haruka presses, “come back and see the ginkgo trees, and the Shinto temples. We can stay anywhere you wish. I can sell all my prints, and make more - it would cost less to make them back home. Makoto, come with me.”

Makoto is silent a long time before he says, faintly, “I wish I had your way with words, Haruka.”

“I would support you,” Haruka continues, “I would arrange for all the music in the world to visit you, right at your doorstep. I’ll take you to see all the plays you want. You’ll learn - you would learn so much, Makoto. And you could fill your dreams with the East again.”

“I have responsibilities here,” Makoto whispers, as outside his window, the crowd suddenly roars to life. Haru’s mouth opens in surprise as Makoto turns wide, worried eyes on him. “Haru -”

“I would have your piano shipped to us,” Haru says, seized on the idea that Makoto could come home with him. Home, where - Rei would welcome them so happily, pretend he doesn’t cry. He misses Rei, misses him so sharply that it cuts whenever he thinks about it. “You could play on it all day, write whatever you want.”

Makoto’s hand falls across his own. Something hits the window.

“Haru, I want you to be safe.” He’s got the world spilling from his eyes. “I’m… I’m scared.” Bleeding honest, young and green, all Makoto. “I want you to be safe and I think… maybe we shouldn’t…”

Haru catches him looking anxiously, fleetingly, at the window. “They will leave.”

“What if they don’t?”

“They will,” Haru repeats, “even if I have to fight them off.”

Makoto says, “Haruka, please,” just like he did all those months ago, except this time, he’s holding onto Haru’s hand tightly, everything about his body language in direct contrast to his words. This time, Haruka doesn’t get up, he doesn’t leave; he stays, he gets up and kisses Makoto’s forehead.

 

 

A week later, the dark rumors surrounding Haru spread to the theatre.

Sometimes Makoto will come back from a rehearsal and look weary, rubbing his eyes, or dusting off snow, or with a line across his cheek, a dark spot growing on his jaw. He starts talking about finding a real conductor for the orchestra. His students diminish, one by one, until only Nagisa is left.

Nagisa solemnly tells them to travel somewhere, escape until the riots die down and his window is repaired - “I will have my servants come keep house for you, _sensei_ ,” with the barest hint of sweetness wrapping around a foreign sound in his mouth. “I’ll write to you.” He cries, messily, throwing his arms around Makoto’s body. “I’ll miss you. I’ll always be your friend.” He hugs Haruka, too, with a surprising amount of strength, and he tells Haruka, “Take care of _sensei_.”

“I will,” Haru promises. “I’ll always take care of him.”

Spring comes, and melts Makoto’s resolve, and Haru stirs from bed one morning to say that he should, possibly, go home and collect his art supplies.

“We’re going to go home,” Makoto whispers, his eyes finally excited again, full of stars.

 

 

Makoto writes more pieces between snowy mornings and violently bitter night winds: a collection of piano pieces, and a song. His apartment looks almost the same, with the same curtains and tablecloth and stack of manuscripts on the piano lid, but the snow outside has paled all the colors. Sunlight is grey, instead of yellow, and there are less fruits, the tea grows cold because they don’t have energy to drink it and a heavy herbal scent floats, aspen-like, through the room sometimes.

Makoto watches as Haru fastens his scarf. He always manages to do it so artistically, arranging the knot, arranging the way it lies across his coat.

“I’ll give all my words to you,” Haru says as he pulls on his gloves, “if we can have this forever.”

“We will,” Makoto says. “We can. I can’t wait - I can almost taste it, home, I mean.”

Haru can, too. He can hear Rei’s voice - a man’s voice, now, deeper than he remembers, probably. He can taste all the food Rei writes to him about. He wonders if the shrine across from their house is still there, if Rei still visits it every day because it’s so high up, high enough to see out for ages. He smiles, and steps outside, and tells Makoto over his shoulder, “See you soon.”

It’s bright, outside, not snowing, the sky blue.

 

 

_subito -_

_._

_._

_._

 

 

Makoto picks up a pen.

He writes: he writes a story. The words which Haruka held pour out of his pen, fall onto the page. He writes the story that Haruka could always hear, about a distant Heaven where there was no night or day, about a brush dipped in ink, about a river cleaving his mind in two.

_It will be me, next time. I’ll take care of him, I’ll fight off his monsters, I’ll say everything I couldn’t this time, I’ll stay with him and he can be the one leaving me behind._

 

 

 

There was shouting outside when Makoto stepped out into the cold, bleary morning. The crowd, alive, throbbing and angry at his door. The slush piling into the crevices of the road, almost see-through but not quite. The way the sky was blue, too bright, no clouds.

The crowd scattered, then, dispersed, leaving behind a body slumped into the ground, a dark coat, dark enough that Makoto wouldn’t notice any blood at first, until he saw the stain spreading across a rumpled scarf.

What else could he do? He rushed to Haruka’s side and saw the red trailing from the corner of his mouth. He shook him, pleaded, _please, Haruka_ but this time, begging him to come back. He tried to wipe away the blood but ended up smearing it all over his hand, and over the paleness of Haruka’s face, like opium along the curve of his lower lip. He yelled for help. He shivered, went numb, was still numb when they peeled him away from the ground, and away from Haruka. He was numb for the next three, four, five - who knows? - months. (They, who was they? He doesn’t remember.) Everything faded into a pale blue eternity, ceaseless and stationary as the river’s flow.

 

 

He tastes the scent of plum blossoms in the air that spring, even though they are halfway across the world.

Plum blossoms, wood, and fresh ink, and whenever he pens another note, it seeps across the page in dark, dark blue.

 

 

His work consumes him. Eats him raw and whole, leaves behind something translucent and frail, a skeletal face, fingers that shake when they curl into piano keys, something not entirely there lingering after each phrase. He writes and writes and writes. The piece writes itself. He thinks he might be taking advantage of all those words that Haruka was supposed to say, and never did.

When he’s finished, he considers burning it. There isn’t much else of him left behind.

 

 

Being a genius burns from the inside out. His eyes are too bright and his arms shake when he binds up the manuscript.

He walks into the outside world again, where it is sunny and snow has long melted off the ground, and the trees have exchanged flowers for deep, fanning leaves. He walks along the river and hands the bound score to the first person he sees. No one recognizes him anymore. He watches as the kid, a little boy with eyes of gold and hair like flame, with sunlight glinting off his shining skin, heaves it into his arms and disappears around the corner.

And then, Makoto disappears, too.

 

 

The score is curious. It comes without program notes, without much instructions, and calls for a instruments that would cost too much to import. In the front, there’s something titled “Foreword” - but all it says is: “I could feel my greatest work growing inside of me, but I would rather be dead than to hear it myself.”

That disappears as well, a secret - a confidence - in the publishing office.

Everything slips away. Even genius disappears over time, if there is no one to discover it.

 

 

 

**da capo**

They’re sitting on Makoto’s bed, Haru on the edge with a damp towel hanging loosely off his head, Makoto peering over his shoulder. Haru has a laptop set across his legs, using the touchpad to move down the page every few seconds.

“Let me read it again,” he says after a minute, and hears Makoto groan a little.

“Haru, you’ve read it three times already,” he says, “I’m not even done with it yet.”

“It’s…” the tips of Haru’s eyebrows come together a little closer; the focus in his eyes slide off to the side. The laptop has been running too long, and burns into his skin. He shifts a little, and then abandons his tactic of trying to come up with his own words, instead looking for them in Makoto’s face. “It’s… comforting, somehow.”

“Somehow?”

He loves the way Makoto’s eyes widen, full of stars. “Somehow, it’s like… reading your stories… like you took them right out of my head.”

“Then, wouldn’t they be your stories instead?”

Haru shakes his head, impatient, giving up. He tilts until his forehead presses against Makoto’s warm neck. It is quiet in the room, save for the sound of their quiet breaths, the sound of the cooling fan whirring in the laptop. The house is empty, too. There is the kind of quiet that makes him wonder about the ocean, or if there are nymphs in the wood, if the dust gathering in the attic knows stories that they don’t.

“Maybe I gave them to you,” he says, finally, “So you can be the one telling them back to me.”

 

.

.

.

 

**fine.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a huge thanks to z, my beta for putting up with this entire thing from start to finish despite having little/no knowledge of the time period or most of what i'm writing about, but doing research anyway and letting herself be screamed at in the dead of night. for the original prompt, visit [here](http://marukaprompts.tumblr.com/post/74020777510/ow-ow-owwww-a); and a huge thank you for reading this!
> 
>  _subito_ is a music term, italian for _suddenly_ , without warning, etc.  
>  _le poisson_ is french for "the fish" - yeah... ... .. really subtle there, right?


End file.
